Detecting the radiative decay of the cosmic neutrino background with line-intensity mapping

Abstract

We study the possibility to use line-intensity mapping (LIM) to seek photons from the radiative decay of neutrinos in the cosmic neutrino background. The Standard Model prediction for the rate for these decays is extremely small, but it can be enhanced if new physics increases the neutrino electromagnetic moments. The decay photons will appear as an interloper of astrophysical spectral lines. We propose that the neutrino-decay line can be identified with anisotropies in LIM clustering and also with the voxel intensity distribution. Ongoing and future LIM experiments will have -- depending on the neutrino hierarchy, transition and experiment considered -- a sensitivity to an effective electromagnetic transition moment $\sim 10^{-12}\, -\,10^{-8}\, (m_ic^2/{0.1 \rm eV})^{3/2}\mu_{\rm B}$, where $m_i$ is the mass of the decaying neutrino and $\mu_{\rm B}$ is the Bohr magneton. This will be significantly more sensitive than cosmic microwave background spectral distortions, and it will be competitive with stellar cooling studies. As a byproduct, we also report an analytic form of the one-point probability distribution function for neutrino-density fluctuations, obtained from the Quijote simulations using symbolic regression.